Carthage burned for seventeen days, when razed by Scipio Africanus the Younger.
Rome burned for nine, in Nero’s conflagration.
By Horace’s lights, the fact that Homer commended wine made it self-evident that he was a tippler.
Why does it seem odd to Author that Yeats and Kipling were born in the same year?
The writer who first suggested in print, decades after the fact, that Byron had committed incest with his half sister Augusta Leigh, was Harriet Stowe.
Woolsthorpe. Where Newton did or did not have his attention caught by an apple falling from a branch.
I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.
Said Freud, rejecting drugs while enduring the cancer that slowly took his life.
Sein und Zeit.
Pope Julius II, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, and who hired Raphael — and who always sought out Jewish physicians.
Rembrandt’s connection with the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Even living there, in the years after his bankruptcy and eviction.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.
Leonardo’s long treatise on painting. In which the only one of his contemporaries he mentions by name is Botticelli.
New York City, Martha Graham died in.
L’être et le néant.
Oliver Goldsmith fled in panic into Saint James Park rather than sit through the opening night of She Stoops to Conquer.
Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Joshua Reynolds were among those who went searching for him to announce its success.
To avoid confusion with the painter George Frederic Watts, the critic Theodore Watts changed his name to Watts-Dunton.
And received a telegram from Whistler: Theodore, What’s Dunton?
Sir Francis Bacon died of what began as a chill during an experiment to see how long he could preserve a fowl by freezing it in snow.
In 1626.
Hegel told himself he was depraved — his word — when he concluded he admired Rossini’s Figaro opera more than Mozart’s.
Daddy? Couldn’t that lady cut herself, standing on that seashell?
His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.
The executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck.
Ventured Anne Boleyn.
Do it to Julia!
Jeanie Deans. Nelly Dean.
At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.
Still remembered from antiquity:
That Menander was extraordinarily handsome.
Xenophon the same.
Charlemagne had eight legitimate children from four wives.
And ten otherwise.
Caesar’s premature baldness.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his early twenties, played the bass drum in a performance of something of Beethoven’s.
And never once came in at the right time, Beethoven said.
Being reminded that the earliest use of writing was in making lists.
For commerce.
I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.
Langston Hughes was a busboy in a Washington hotel when he left three poems beside Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate — which led to his first publication in white periodicals.
Brautigan lived alone in an empty house for a week before neighbors tracked down an address and took up a collection for bus fare.
The version of the myth that has Odysseus sail far enough beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found what becomes Lisbon.
Richard M. Nixon, after the shooting by National Guardsmen of four undergraduates at Kent State University, re college students protesting the Vietnam War:
Bums.
Was Andrea Mantegna’s Padua fresco The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest single loss to art in World War II?
Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey — but his heart was buried in the Dorchester countryside that he had called Wessex in the novels.
Louis Aragon once threatened to beat up any Paris critic who reviewed his next book. None did.
Chekhov wrote as many as eight hundred short stories.
I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
We consider the price of two hundred marks per woman excessive. We propose to pay not more than 170 per head. We need approximately 150 women.
The greatest living Englishman, C. P. Snow called Paul Dirac in the early 1970s.
Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.
Said Proust.
We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations.
Said Saint-Évremond.
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?
Qualmless.
Marianne Moore wore a Nixon campaign button.
Umberto Eco, asked about the impulse behind writing The Name of the Rose.
I felt like poisoning a monk.
Auden’s Manhattan residence, for years, was in a shoddy apartment building on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village.
Where an earlier tenant had been Trotsky.
Luciano Pavarotti’s apartment on Central Park South had earlier been Sophia Loren’s.
Christmas Day, 800 AD.
Frozen music, Schelling called architecture.
Anne Boleyn’s daughter.
Göttingen, Max Planck died in.
How near to where Anne Hutchinson and fourteen out of fifteen of her family members were massacred by Indians does the Hutchinson River Parkway run?
I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
We acknowledge your accord. Prepare for us 150 women in the best possible health.
Reichenbach Falls.
A Lucas Cranach woodcut, illustrating a corrosive anti-Catholic tract of Luther’s:
The Pope, athwart a pig, blessing a pile of dung.
At a memorial Mass for Beethoven a week after his death, the music chosen was Mozart’s Requiem.
The report that Ben Jonson could recite verbatim every word he had ever written.
Leibniz died sitting up with a copy of John Barclay’s Argenis in his lap.